I was super excited for this weeks assigned “texts” as our professor puts it. Arrival has been on my “to watch” list for quite some time (more on that later) and as the child of an old-school trekkie, I was eager to finally watch some next gen.
As an English major, writer, and avid reader, language has been a huge part of my academic career as well as my hobbies. One of my major requirements was actually a History of the English Language class and though it was one of my least favorite classes in practice, learning about the linguistic growth of a language I worked so closely with was fascinating.
This was probably why I loved Story of Your Life so much when I read it during my first year at Stony Brook. For those of you who don’t know, Story of Your Life is the book that Arrival was based on. and in my opinion, the movie was a fair interpretation of the text ! Though I will say, non-linear plotlines read a lot easier on paper, which I think connects to the way Heptapod is read rather than spoken (though I think I remember it being spoken in the short story but that was two years ago and my memory is fuzzy.) The non-linear way the story was told mirrored the non-linear way the Heptapods communicated and thought. What I loved about the Heptapod language was that it was written in a circular form. The Heptapod’s non-linear way of perceiving time directly connects to the shape of their language. If time is being viewed as a circle, or a more three-dimensional shape in the case of the “gift,” it would make sense that language would be written in that way as well.
On the other side of things, in Darmok, the Tamarians express language through imagery and metaphor, connecting their situation and current state to a story or part of their history. It’s as if I decided to communicate only in references from one of my favorite television shows despite the fact that not everyone has seen it. Has anyone even heard of Pushing Daisies ? Anyway, the metaphorical way the Tamarians speak suggest a more abstract outlook on life. While the episode focuses mostly on the two captains learning to understand one another, if we take a step back and pull from the information we learned in Arrival we can infer that the Tamarians have a specific perception of the world.
The main argument of Arrival is explained using the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that a persons language influences their perception of the world and their thought process. We can see this in the way the Heptapods view time. While we learn very little of the Tamarians, we’re told that “imagery is everything to them.” What must the world look like to someone who experiences life as one extended metaphor ?
One thought on “Talking in Circles (Literally ?)”
Hi Ari,
Thanks for sharing all of that info about “Story of Your Life.” I’ll admit to having never read it, but it is on my pile of things to read. Yours is not the first very enthusiastic endorsement of it that I’ve heard! You points about the non-linear storytelling of the novella is really interesting, and I think we do get some of that in the film as well. Of course, the affordances of film are different that literature, but technique that stands out to me is the use of cross-cutting. Cross-cutting is generally used to show two scenes happening at the same time in the film. It can be used to suggest that a character is remembering something—but generally only if it is a scene that has already taken place within the film (so that the viewers will also remember it). In the scene where Louise calls General Shang, we get cross-cutting between her phone call and her subsequent meeting of them. She is remembering her future, but the cross-cutting between these scenes also suggests that they are happening simultaneously, which is, of course, how the hetpapods perceive time.
You also make a great point about the need for cultural familiarity in order to make sense of communication like the Tamarians. Everyone needs to get the reference. Your final sentence has me thinking about what you learned this week about conceptual metaphors. What do you make of the fact that our language is also largely based in metaphor–even if those metaphors have become so conventional and automatic that we don’t recognize them as metaphors at all?
Jessica Hautsch